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Its October and Im Octobreading....

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After a good, long run, we have decided to close our forums in an effort to refocus attention to other sections of the site. Fortunately for you all, we're living in a time where discussion of a favorite topic now has a lot of homes. So we encourage you all to bring your ravenous love for discussion to Chuck's official Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram. And, as always, you can still post comments on all News updates. Thank you for your loyalty and passion over the years. These changes will happen June 1.

Moving on to Dope by Sara Gran. The paperback was on backorder forever, so I Kindle'd it. Following that will be Bleed into Me, a Stephen Graham Jones shorts collection from 2005, priming myself for his upcoming The Ones That Got Away horror collection next month.

And for this bit of flattery, I present you with the only part of this project that I am going to reveal for the time being — the opening of Heart of Darkness as revised by Phil. About half of it is Conrad's; the other half is sheer invention on my part:

Chapter One

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

The Director of Companies, no longer perched upon a barrel but still crooked-back from the effort, was our captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom. All around, pressing down upon us as to smother us in the bed of the waters, the smell, forever unfamiliar, of lavender: the lavender scent of the great sleep. We were caught, and pleased to be, between the pull of the conscious anchor behind and, ahead, the armada of oneiric fluidity. We heard cicadas; there were none.

Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's yarns — and even convictions. The Lawyer — the best of old fellows — had, because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. He smoked, releasing subtle rivulets of fume into the abyss above, and shrugged without a sound. He looked at Marlow with a timidly condescending eye — and, not for the first time, I wondered if there weren’t a hidden antagonism between the men, a divergence of spirits that had left them politely disagreeable with each other when their gazes crossed and their souls drew swords their mouths would not wield.

The Accountant seemed to have no notion of this. He had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones. Whenever the Lawyer shrugged, the Accountant, perhaps — though how, God himself could not explain — mistaking the shrugs for yawns, coughed in response. The comicality went unnoticed by all except by Marlow, who, at every such occurrence, gave me a silent look of amusement and then closed his eyes to search some hidden treasure in his memories, no longer thinking of either loathed Lawyer or dishonest Accountant. Dishonest, because this little pale man of forty had at almost every chance pinched food from Marlow’s plate in the latter’s distraction. The Accountant, to whose simple mind this sort of trickery was the highest hilarity, never caught on that Marlow, in his cunning — for Marlow was the most cunning of us all — had, in vengeance and in sheer mean-spiritedness, dropped a fly in the Accountant’s glass. This fly — an anomaly, to be sure; that was no season for flies, and the sea prohibits them — had been lying dead on Marlow’s bed when he’d found it, and at once he had had the cruel intention of loosing the tragic little corpse in the typhoon of the Accountant’s wine glass. Difficult to forget the little man’s oblivious expression as he guzzled the wine to the final repulsive drop!

I'm so close to being done with The Sound and the Fury. After I finish I'm starting Jon Stewart's new book, Earth. My grandmother bought it for me after seeing Oprah interview him. She thinks he's hilarious and has started recording his show every night. I have a cool grandmother.

It's a project I'm extremely excited about. You heard it here first. Without removing a SINGLE word from Heart of Darkness, I am going to change the text, to make it new, to deepen it.

I've already started this new book, and it's fucking with my head in the right way.

interesting. i've just read and re-read Heart of Darkness probably close to a dozen times over the last month or two. i'm studying it for uni, and loving it. it's a great story. pretty risque move, Phil, but i expect nothing less from you and your experimental ways.

other than my uni texts and bits and pieces online or on the toilet (shorts, poetry and the like) i haven't been reading nearly as much as i normally do. i guess i'm going through a slump or something. i've had my own projects on my mind too much, too.

but, in saying that, Natalie and i started reading Room by Emma Donoghue together. and it's fucking amazing. i'm not sure if i'd normally cling to it this much. maybe it's because i haven't been reading much and it's just what the literary doctor ordered, but it's so captivating. and heartbreaking. i even teared up at one point. and got all shakey. it's really pulled me in.

it's written from the first person present tense perspective of a five year-old boy. and i generally get pissed off with that, but she balances the prose really well. it teeters on having the voice of a five year-old and still being readable so perfectly. chuck would be proud of the "burnt tongue". it's fairly plot-based, well, the first half is, but there's a tone of characterisation in there. the characters are very strong. i, honestly, can't recommend it hard enough. it's a quick, easy read too.

i won't go too much into the plot itself, but i will say it's about a mother and son that live permanently in an 11x11 room and never leave. the son, Jack, was born there and he knows of nothing else.

Disregarding the fact that you just ordered everyone's books but mine . . . yes, I bought the latest-generation Kindle a month ago for the same reason and I absolutely love it. The screen owns. I'm reading more often in more places, and I'm still on my first battery charge. The downside is not having your existing paper library on there, but I picked a bunch of my favorite books that were on sale as a starting point, and the usual free public domain classics, of course.

Don't worry, Gordon, he didn't pick up Caleb's or pre-order Nik's either. Your not alone. But feel comforted by the fact that I bought your book many moons ago and read it with complete enjoyement from front to back. And I'm fairly sure I closed the back cover with a slight grin on my face.

It's a project I'm extremely excited about. You heard it here first. Without removing a SINGLE word from Heart of Darkness, I am going to change the text, to make it new, to deepen it.

I've already started this new book, and it's fucking with my head in the right way.

interesting. i've just read and re-read Heart of Darkness probably close to a dozen times over the last month or two. i'm studying it for uni, and loving it. it's a great story. pretty risque move, Phil, but i expect nothing less from you and your experimental ways.

It's a very hard text to work with. Heart of Darkness is one of my favorite novellas, but there is a lot in it that could be exploited and turned into a new "thing". What I'm doing is slicing and dicing, basically — using Heart of Darkness as the primary text, I'm slipping in whole paragraphs from other, less known writers from that period, and creating a new narrative. Marlow becomes Kurtz in my version, and the framing story in Conrad's text (The Nellie, where Marlow tells of his adventures in the Congo) becomes the main stage in mine.

It's going to piss off literary purists, of course. Especially because I am using other authors and plagiarising their work completely, modifying their words as I see fit. Oh but it will be glorious.

I'm excited to read this. I'm still apprehensive to whether it's going to work out and be somethig worth both mine and your time, but yeah, interesting. Copy/paste story: for the lazy novelist (this excludes Burroughs, obviously). Just kidding, Phil. It's a very ambitious project, one that I know I wouldn't have the capability to pursue, let alone conjure, so I congratulate you already.

Just giving him a hard time. Nik's and Caleb's, though, that's downright unforgivable. heh heh Thanks again for the kind words, Matty. (Can I call you Matty?)

you can call me whatever the hell you want, man. But, yeah, Matty is one of the preferred options, and a few people on here call me that, though thinking about it now it's mostly the girls of the cult, but whatever comes naturally to you is probably best.

Has anyone bought, read or heard anything about a little collection of shorts by Robin Black called If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This? I love the title and I read a few opening paragraphs and it sounds pretty fucking cool. I'm gonna buy it online though because the one at the bookstore was one of those disgustingly large trade paperbacks that cost way more than a paperback should.

I also read the blurb of some other book and my heart broke. Not because of the plot but because it was pretty much the same idea that I had for this epic love story. The idea was that this guy can remember each of his past lives and centuries ago he fell in love and now each new life he spends searching for the soul of his lover. I think I'll still write it someday because I read a bit of the prologue and it read pretty badly. It was kind of Stephanie meyer-ish. Or Audrey Niffen-whatever-ish. I tried reading TTW but I couldn't stand the prose.

Well that was my morning at the bookstore. T'was a very revealing half hour.

I finished Demon Theory almost a week ago (sorry haven't been on much lately). I loved it. The only thing I didn't like about it was it was hard to sympathize with the characters due to the style of the writing. The all seemed like cardboard cutouts. But otherwise I liked the book a lot. My second favorite Jones so far after All The Beautiful Sinners.

I've been reading Mind Hunter by John Douglas. I love the field of Criminal Psychology. I hope to one day be involved in it somehow. And John Douglas's books are as close as you can get to a first person account of how it all goes.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire - Charles Bukowski (just finished)
Three of a Kind - James Cain
The Butterfly - James Cain
Why I'm Not a Christian - Bertrand Russel
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller (let's see if I can finish it this time)

EDIT:

...and Republic - Plato. I listened to the audio book (free!) from iTunes, but some things you just have to read with your eyes.

I borrowed this from a friend. I liked this one so much I wasn't too disappointed when my daughter ripped it. I was *forced* to buy my friend a new copy to replace the damaged one, and now I have a copy.

I read Night by Elie Wiesel and The Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick III today. I dug both of them. Pretty short, read them while waiting for my classes. I have some more books by Mellick, and I will most likely read those, and then I have some books by some of the other Bizarro authors. I guess thats what they are in. Odd and interesting. I have Beat The Reaper, so I will probably read that too. The possibilities are endless. A lot of days left in October, so much ca happen.

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